The papers of novelist, poet, and teacher
Christine Brooke-Rose provide representative forms of all of her major works including
books, essays, and poems, as well as extensive correspondence from agents, editors,
friends,
and students. Also present is a quantity of personal materials documenting Brooke-Rose's
education, wartime service, marriages, and divorces.

Call Number:

Manuscript Collection MS-0532

Languages:

English,
French,
and German.

Access:

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Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 16,
1923.
The younger of two daughters of Alfred Northbrook Rose, who was English, and Evelyn
Brooke
Rose, who was half Swiss and half American, Christine Brooke-Rose was raised in Brussels
and
educated at Somerville College, Oxford (B.A. 1949, M.A. 1953) and University College,
London
(Ph.D. 1954). Her parents' marriage dissolved while Brooke-Rose was quite young; her
father
died in 1934, and her mother later became a Benedictine nun (Mother Anselm).

During World War II, Brooke-Rose served as an intelligence officer in the British
Women's
Auxiliary Air Force, working at Bletchley Park. She married Rodney Ian Shirley Bax,
whom she
met through her war work, on May 16, 1944. They were divorced in January, 1948, and
the
marriage was later annulled. On February 13, 1948, Brooke-Rose married Polish poet
and
novelist Jerzy Pietrkiewicz (later Peterkiewicz). When her husband became ill in 1956,
Brooke-Rose began to write novels after having published Gold (1955), a metaphysical religious poem based upon the anonymous
fourteenth-century English poem Pearl. Her first two novels,
The Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958), were satirical novels of manners. The Dear Deceit (1960), based upon her father's life, and The Middlemen: A Satire (1961) were also conventional novels,
although The Dear Deceit used the technique of presenting the
story in reverse chronological order.

After her own illness in 1962, Brooke-Rose's fiction changed dramatically; her next
novel,
Out (1964), discarded the traditional ideals of character and plot
and began the play with language and form that has marked her work ever since. From
1956 to
1968, Brooke-Rose worked in London as a freelance literary journalist. In 1968, Brooke-Rose
separated from her husband and moved to Paris, beginning a career as a teacher of
Anglo-American literature and literary theory at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes.
As
a professor, Brooke-Rose was able to work on her fiction only during summer breaks.
Such (1966) is the story of the after-death experience of an
astronomer, told in terms of astrophysics. Between (1968), centering around
the experiences of a professional translator, is a book about language and communication.
In
1970, Go When You See the Green Man Walking, a collection of short
stories, was published. Brooke-Rose has called her next novel, Thru (1975), a "fiction about the
fictionality of fiction."

Nine years elapsed between the publication of Thru and the publication of Amalgamemnon (1984); Brooke-Rose referred to this period as her
"traversée du desert."Amalgamemnon and three subsequent novels, Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991), form a loose "computer quartet" reflecting on the demise of humanism. Amalgamemnon, written entirely in future and conditional tenses, is
about a female professor of literature in a time when the humanities have become irrelevant.
Xorandor is a science fiction story about the discovery by two
children of a silicon-based civilization that feeds on nuclear radiation. The story
is
written in the form of dialogue and computer printouts by the children, who use an
invented
technological slang. The book incorporates areas of physics and was written with the
assistance of the author's cousin, Claude Brooke, a physicist to whom Brooke-Rose
was
briefly married from 1981 to 1982. In Verbivore, a sequel, the now
grown children must deal with Xorandor's descendants, whose activities have caused
a failure
of electronic communications media. Textermination, about the
gathering of hundreds of recognizable literary characters at a Convention of Prayer
for
Being, deals with the advent of a semi-literate popular culture.

As a translator, Brooke-Rose was best known for In the Labyrinth (1968), an English translation of Alain
Robbe-Grillet's Dans le labyrinth and winner of the 1969 Arts
Council Translation Prize.

As a literary critic, Brooke-Rose was best known for her two studies of Ezra Pound,
A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) and A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: Jakobson's Method Extended and
Applied to Free Verse (1976). A Grammar of Metaphor (1958), a
critical study of English poets, was an outgrowth of her doctoral work at University
College. A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) is a collection of
essays analyzing narrative techniques in various types of fiction, while Stories, Theories, and Things (1991) contains essays of structural
analyses of literary texts and general discussions of issues in literary theory.

In 1992, when the first of her papers were acquired by the Ransom Center, Brooke-Rose
was
retired from teaching and living in the south of France. Since then, she published
Remake (1996), Next (1998), Subscript (1999), Poems, Letters, Drawings (2000),
Invisible Author: Last Essays (2002), Life, End of (2006), and Brooke-Rose Omnibus (2006).

Brooke-Rose died March 21, 2012.

The Christine Brooke-Rose papers consist of original and carbon copy typescripts,
holograph
manuscripts, computer printouts, notebooks, correspondence, clippings, galley proofs,
original and photocopy page proofs, offprints, documents, printed genealogies, publishing
contracts, royalty statements, family papers, electronic files, and digital images,
ranging
in date from 1893 to 2005 (bulk 1957-1992). The material is arranged in five series:
I.
Works, 1897-1997; II. Reviews, 1955-1992; III. Correspondence, 1956-1999; and IV.
Personal/Family, 1893-2005. The Works series is arranged in three subseries: Books,
Essays,
and Poetry. The Reviews series is divided into two subseries: Reviews by Christine
Brooke-Rose and Reviews of Works by Christine Brooke-Rose. The Correspondence series
has two
subseries: Business Correspondence and Personal Correspondence.

All of Brooke-Rose's major works up to 1992 are represented in some form. Many early
versions of works are present, and these often reveal original titles. In the folder
list,
the discarded titles of works are indicated with quotation marks, and the final titles
are
italicized. Where Brooke-Rose had labeled varying versions of manuscripts, those labels
are
retained and indicated in the folder list with single quotation marks. In keeping
with
Brooke-Rose's tendency toward chronological order, works and personal/family papers
have
also been arranged in chronological order. Reviews and correspondence remain in the
chronological order established by Brooke-Rose.

Most of the correspondence is incoming correspondence from publishers, agents, editors,
friends, colleagues, and students. Among the correspondents are Brigid Brophy, Frank
Kermode, Peter du Sautoy, Muriel Spark, Raleigh Trevelyan, and Michael Westlake. All
correspondents are included in the Index of Correspondents.

Among the personal and family materials in the collection are documents and correspondence
relating to Brooke-Rose's education, career, wartime service, marriages, and divorces.

Atari computer disks that were received with the collection have been reformatted
to
Macintosh's operating system. The texts of the files were compared with manuscripts
already
present in the collection; when the texts differed, the computer files were printed.
These
printouts are grouped together by computer disk. Due to the computer reformatting,
margins,
fonts, and some diacritics are not the way they appeared on Brooke-Rose's original
disks.

Brooke-Rose's personal copies of her books, anthologies containing her work, offprints,
and
periodicals containing her work have been withdrawn from the collection and cataloged
with
the Center's book holdings. Some copies are signed or annotated by Brooke-Rose.

Other manuscripts relating to Christine Brooke-Rose held at the Ransom Center are
located
in the Alec Craig, John Lehmann, London Magazine, and Compton Mackenzie collections.

Brooke-Rose's personal copies of her books, anthologies containing her work, offprints,
and
periodicals containing her work were trannsferred to the Ransom Center Library and
cataloged
with the Center's book holdings. Some copies are signed or annotated by Brooke-Rose.